At some point in the recent past, Apple's iPod became THE MP3 player to beat. Many have claimed to have created an iPod killer (including Apple with their iPhone), but so far no one has delivered. Microsoft's attempt is the Zune, and it has been on the market long enough to mature and get the early kinks out of it's software.&

The AutumnWave OnAir USB HDTV Creator is a high def TV Tuner that connects via a USB cable, and allows you to watch HD programming on your PC. It also comes with a nice software suite allowing control over channels, recording times as well as image tweaking. While HotHardware was reviewing the tuner, they were very impressed by the proper display of the image, but found the

An interesting link came into my inbox this morning with the tag line "LinkBoost" and it pointed to the NVIDIA.com website. Here on the Tech Specs page for the nForce 600 series chipsets, if you scroll ALL the way to the bottom, you'll see this note:

**Note: NVIDIA LinkBoost™ technology has been removed as a feature from NVIDIA nForceÂ® 680i SLI

Sunnyvale, CA-April 23, 2007-OCZ Technology Group, a worldwide leader in
innovative, ultra-high performance and high reliability memory and power
supplies, today announced the new StealthXStream Power Supply. This new 600W
PSU features a conservative look with a sleek, black case and fan.

The ECS 965PLT-A board isn't available yet, but it won't be too long before you start to see it on the shelves. As TweakTown notes in their review, the board is misnamed, as it is built around the 946GZ chipset, not the 965. Although it's onboard graphics are lack luster, they have included 2 PCI Express x16 slots, so it can easily be the basis of a decent gaming rig.

The Sapphire X1950 Pro Dual is a pair of X1950 GPUs piggybacked on one circuit board. Unfortunately it seems to be a paper release, as there is nowhere to buy it, and it is not listed on the Sapphire website. Still, HotHardware managed to get their hands on one and benchmark it. While it does offer good performance, it has difficulty pulling ahead of the DX10 8800 GTS 320 MB and trouble fitting inside most cases.

A member spotted a very interesting project over the weekend, and has started quite a buzz in the thread. The Alky Project is using the DirectX SDK on Windows XP to write DirectX 10 compatibility libraries. The basic idea is that the DX10 Geometry Shaders could be changed to native machine code on non-Vista machines, allowing your video card to render it, assumedly with a performance hit. While it seems unlikely that they will get DX10 running on non-DX10 hardware, it will allow DX10 to run on XP if they succeed.

Well, it's another Sunday. It's been darn busy at my house this last week. Seems we are working through some medical issues....gettin olde is like that. Ya gotta keep going back to the pits lap after lap...

OK, by now you know the drill: Hi there. Let me take a minute to introduce myself. I'm Uncle Bob, a Mod here at PC Perspective. We will be running a series of articles within the forum that will be called Mod Interviews.

Second Life is a very different kind of MMO game, not involving raids and dungeon crawls instead relying on interaction as the key. There are no levels to go up or rare items to find, you make them yourself or trade with someone who does. Another big difference is the fact that it is free.

AnandTech re-reviews the Hitachi DeskStar 7K1000, this time with a pair set up in RAID 0. They find very little difference between the real application performance of this drive in single or RAID 0, nor can it keep up with the Raptors. However, if you are looking for nice looking benchmark scores, you definitely want the RAID.